Of Lies and Rain News

[p]Hi everyone,

We're thrilled to annouce that the final version of "Of Lies and Rain" will be released[/p][p][/p][p]Novemeber 4th 9AM PT on Steam, Meta and PSVR2[/p][p][/p][p]In the beginning we thought that it would take more time to fix all the bugs and that the we would have had more problems with early access. It turns out early access was already pretty polished with virtually no blocking bugs and just a few thing to correct before the final release.[/p][p]Some of you who played the game in early access and gave us feedback told us that the game could have been released in full already as "Of Lies and Rain" is in pretty good shape already.[/p][p]They criticized us for not releasing in full the 10th of September because this way we were gonna hurt sales. First of all as a dev it's amazing to see players concearned that you are not gonna sell enough copies! This makes us feel part of a community more than a customer-developer relationship it seems like we're all on the same side, to grow the VR in it's whole.[/p][p]So while we agree that the early access might have hurt sales we are still convinced it was the right thing to do, we got the chance to have some more player feedback so we took a couple of months to add features and polish the game even more.[/p][p][/p][p]---The next section might have some SPOILERS---[/p][p][/p][p]Things we added and fixed frtom early access realease: [/p]

• [p]Beath volume and inhalers balance[/p]
• [p]Footsteps (depending on the surface you're on)[/p]
• [p]Sprinting[/p]
• [p]better iron sight[/p]
• [p]Projectile traces[/p]
• [p]Fixed some hand interactions with objects[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that would disable a cableway[/p]
• [p]Datawolds redesign, just the mandatory ones.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that would disable a cableway[/p]
• [p]Fixed Adrian Office screen texture Typo.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that made the cableway not working after loading a game.[/p]
• [p]Fixed some more invisible walls.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that made audio disappear in some spots.[/p]
• [p]Lower reflection on some material to lower aliasing problems[/p]
• [p]Laser interaction menu visibility[/p]
• [p]Hand on the opposite side when grabbin bin[/p]
• [p]Russian translation improvements[/p]
• [p]added ambient volume option[/p]
• [p]added thumbstick sensitivity option (fix drift on old controllers)[/p]
• [p]added haptics intensity option[/p]
• [p]fix first trigger action ignored[/p]
• [p]fix floating hand bug[/p]
• [p]fix shotgun half-discharged magazines[/p]
• [p]fix enhanced input buttons (use started/completed events)[/p]
• [p]fix coupled trigger/height calibration options [/p]
• [p]fix nest 1st elevator going back[/p]
• [p]fix dataworld anchor better unlock[/p]
• [p]fix machinegun secondary grab collisions[/p]
• [p]fix scorpion grenade throwback [/p]
• [p]fix elevators with preactivation pops on activation (labirynth/adecore) [/p]
• [p]fix Flower not starting after the labyrinth[/p]
• [p]added screen percentage option +/-50% (skipping 100 that causes reprojection)[/p]
• [p]added spectator window mode option (windowed/fullscreen)[/p]
• [p]fix TAA ghosting/jittering (suggest to increase sharpness a bit for best visuals)[/p]
• [p]fix Vulkan rendering (disabled SM6, also for DX12)[/p]
• [p]enhanced SteamVR haptics curves[/p]
• [p]Fixed the infinite die buga[/p]
• [p]Accessibility menu option monoscopic[/p]

[p][/p][p]What you asked but we coudn't do: [/p][p][/p][p]There a few things that many players wanted us to add and we didn't, the reason is money and time, as always, trust me if we had a decent budget we would have made a better game. This is the best we could do whit what we had, 5 people and no money.[/p][p]Npcs:[/p][p]It takes a lot of money and time to make NPCs, we choose to have a dead world and no one around also for that reason, we agree with you that some encounters throughout the game would have been great but that is something our small studio just coudn't afford.[/p][p]More cinematics:[/p][p]Same reason here, not enough money and frankly we're not super experts in cinematics, we should have hired some people to do it but again, no time, and no money this time. [/p][p]Better trailer:[/p][p]We did ask some external to take care of the trialer but it was like 10-15k. simply too much for us. the trailer we managed to make may not be the best and according to many of you it doesn't really show how good the game is, but it's again the best we could do.[/p][p]Better graphics:[/p][p]Regarding to graphics this a personal matter as who is writing here is the tcchnical artist, ceo and community manager and I took care of the graphics aspect of the game. There are some places in the game that will feel a bit lower quality in terms of 3d Models and Textures, again it takes a lot of time to make everything look great, and I didn't have enough to do all that, I apologize if some part of the game are not supersharp but I hope that won't ruin the experince too much.[/p][p]Less text and instead a voice over for all the memories:[/p][p]Too much money and time here as well, we would have needed some more voice actors and very long recordings for a voice over of all the memories, There is also a tecnical problem here, if you had to hear them while roaming through the game they could have overlapped with some in game dialogues and would have had to truncate one or another. If you had to stay still with the memory opened you might just as well read it, but yeah not ideal, we know.[/p][p][/p][p]That said I wanna thank everyone who bought the early access, this saved the company for the moment, we gotta say that the numbers for the moment are really low, definitely not enough to keep the company going, we don't have funding, we don't have a publisher so this is it, if something doesn't change in the future we're screwed.[/p][p]Reviews are amazing though, we still have a 93% positive review and it's still early access. Most of our players really enjoyed our game and some even suggested us for VR GOTY.[/p][p]This is beyond words and if we're gonna close the studio after full release this time will stay with us for the rest of our lives, we love making games and we've done it for the last 5 years, all together as friends and with an amazing community of players that really gave us infinite hours of playtesting asking nothing in return.[/p][p]We coudn't have asked for anything better![/p][p][/p][p]But it's not the time to give up just yet, there's still couple of weeks to go to full release, we want to release one more update. [/p][p]After full release anything can change.[/p][p][/p][p]Keeping our finger crossed.[/p][p]Best,[/p][p]Castello Inc Team. [/p]

[p]Hi Everyone!
[/p][p]Fifth Week and as promised fifth Update.[/p][p][/p][p]so, Dataworlds...[/p][p][/p][p]This is at the same time the most loved and most hated part of our game.[/p][p][/p][p]Some find them boring, too difficult, frustrating, and at some point not fun. Some players want us to make a game just within those worlds. It's very difficult to tackle feedback like this, we don't want players to get frustrated but we don't want to denaturate the dataworlds gameplay wich is a core part of our game.[/p][p][/p][p]So we decided to make the few mandatory dataworlds just a bit more doable and leave the most challanging ones as they are, they were not mandatory anyway, but they are good to get some more gpus and health.[/p][p][/p][p]Hopefully this will make everyone able to enjoy the game and not get frustrated in the mandatory ones and will leave the hardcore players space to enjoy a challange.[/p][p][/p][p]Update Log:[/p]

• [p]Datawolds redesign, just the mandatory ones.[/p]
• [p]Fixed Adrian Office screen texture Typo.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that made the cableway not working after loading a game.[/p]
• [p]Fixed some more invisible walls.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that made audio disappear in some spots.[/p]

[p][/p][p]As always thanks a lot to anyone who brought our game in early access, your help saved the studio.[/p][p]Final release is coming soon and we cannot wait to show the game in it's final form.[/p][p]

[/p][p]Best,[/p][p]Castello Inc Team.[/p][p][/p]

[p]Hi Everyone,

Fourth week, fourth update.

Of Lies and Rain stays at a solid 94% positive review score on Steam. We've passed the 50 reviews mark and got a "very positive", for the overwhelming positive score we'll need to wait to pass the 500 reviews mark, still way to go.

From the feedback we're receiving it seems like the dataworlds really split our players in 2 groups, some love them, some hate them. We did get similar feedback in our early playtests and that's why we made them optional for the most part, some of them are still mandatory, we'll address the datawrolds in the next update.

Also the holographic puzzles throughout the game may be overly reliant on movement skills, so we'll redesign them to focus more on engaging players puzzle solving capabilities.[/p][p]
Thanks to all Early Access players for helping shape this story-driven VR adventure we couldn't do it without you![/p][p][/p][p]Update Log:[/p]

• [p]Gun Iron Sights
  If you can't aim properly in a shooter well that's bad. We enhanced weapon ironsights for better aiming precision[/p]
• [p]Projectile traces
  Added visible projectile traces for improved aim precision.[/p]

• [p]Fixed some hand interactions with objects
  Resolved issues with grabbing and manipulating various in-game objects for smoother VR interactions.[/p]
• [p]Little fixes to environment
  Some invisible walls fixed, Polished environmental details and eliminated problematic invisible walls to prevent clipping and navigation glitches.[/p]
• [p]Fixed a bug that would disable a cableway
  Moved the savegame a bit earlier in the tower to avoid hitboxes overlap. [/p]

[p]A huge thank you to all of you who bought the early access!!! Your support keeps us pushing forward! See you next week, final release is getting closer.

Best,
Castello Inc Team.[/p]

[p]Hi everyone![/p][p][/p][p]Third week, Third update.[/p][p][/p][p]The game is still at a solid 94% positive reviews. Many people are waiting for final release to purchase the game and we do understand that a story driven game like this one is better experienced when finally polished and not in early access.[/p][p]To everyone who’s jumped into Early Access, thank you![/p][p]People might not realize that early access, at least for small indie studio, is a way to gather feedback from a larger audience than early playtesters and steer development accordingly. Also gives us a some much needed funds to keep developing the game.[/p][p]Someone even purchased the early eccess to support us but is waiting for full realease to play it, this is beyond words! Thank you![/p][p]Why no ads?[/p][p]As someone pointed out on reddit we are not making any advertising for the game, the reason is simple, we don't have the money to do it. Early access will also give us some funds to buy some advertising for the final release of the game.[/p][p][/p][p]Update Log:[/p][p]- Sprinting[/p][p]After much debate we decided to add a sprinting feature. The problem here is that the pace of the game, dialogues, enemies and so on were made for a specific player velocity. It is true though that in some spots you really want to have a sprint option.[/p][p]We decided to add it according to your feedback, sprinting will be limited to a 3-second burst with a 10-second cooldown. As per our tests it should allow you to move a bit faster during combat without disrupting the game’s flow.[/p][p]- Fixed the infinite die bug[/p][p]We resolved an issue where players respawned in toxic areas, causing repeated deaths. We moved the toxic areas away from the save games, should be good to go now.[/p][p]- accessibility menu option monoscopic[/p][p]This option is for people with one eye view for whom the pipe holographic lock were basically impossibile to solve, it substitutes the hologrphic pipe locks with cilindric ones.[/p][p]About the holographic locks, some people find them really difficult to solve, we will redesign the more difficult ones to be more accessible in future updates.[/p][p]- Corrected the skill buy widget to handle large localized texts properly.[/p][p]A huge thank you everyone, especially those supporting us in Early Access, your contribution means the world![/p][p][/p][p]See you next week for another update![/p][p][/p][p]Best,[/p][p]Castello Inc Team.[/p][p][/p]

[p]Hi Everyone,

As promised, second week, second upgrade. Of Lies and Rain, is still at a solid 93% review score on steam!

If you enjoyed the game, please consider leaving a review to let us know what you loved or what could be improved.

To everyone who bought the early access we want to ensure you that even if we don't sell one more copy of the game from now on, we will update the game once per week, every week, untill we release the full game later this year. Afterall we have been working for free for almost 2 years, it won't be a few more weeks/months to stop us!

Update Log:

- added Footsteps with footstep volume option
Footsteps will depend on the surface you walk on, if you find it annoying there is a dedicated volume slider in the options.

- added ambient volume option[/p][p]- added thumbstick sensitivity option (fix drift on old controllers)[/p][p]- added haptics intensity option[/p][p]
- fix first trigger action ignored[/p][p]- fix floating hand bug[/p][p]- fix shotgun half-discharged magazines [/p][p]- fix enhanced input buttons (use started/completed events)[/p][p] [/p][p]- fix coupled trigger/height calibration options [/p][p]- fix nest 1st elevator going back[/p][p]- fix dataworld anchor better unlock[/p][p]- fix machinegun secondary grab collisions[/p][p]- fix scorpion grenade throwback [/p][p]- fix elevators with preactivation pops on activation (labirynth/adecore) [/p][p]- fix Flower not starting after the labyrinth[/p][p][/p][p]- added screen percentage option +/-50% (skipping 100 that causes reprojection)[/p][p]- added spectator window mode option (windowed/fullscreen)[/p][p]- fix TAA ghosting/jittering (suggest to increase sharpness a bit for best visuals)[/p][p]- fix Vulkan rendering (disabled SM6, also for DX12)[/p][p]- enhanced SteamVR haptics curves
[/p][p]As always thanks a lot to everyone who played our game and took time to leave a review!!! It helps a lot! See you in a week with the next update.[/p][p][/p][p]Best,[/p][p]Castello Inc Team.[/p]